Women's rugby: the England team that really could win a World Cup

They play drinking games with tea not alcohol, they sport St George’s flag
manicures, off pitch one is a reception teacher. But anyone who doubts the
prowess of the England Women’s rugby team clearly hasn’t seen them in action

It is an arctic Saturday evening in February, I am colder than I have ever been, and England are playing Ireland in the 2014 Women’s Six Nations. For those readers with the level of knowledge I possessed prior to watching this game: this means rugby.

Highlights of England v Ireland in the 2014 Women's Six Nations (Pictures courtesy of BBC Sport)

The adage has always been that: “Football is a gentleman’s game played by ruffians, rugby a ruffian’s game played by gentlemen.” Rugby was fostered in public schools as a means of channelling otherwise riotous testosterone. Of late, however, oestrogen has been increasingly in evidence, as the women’s game has grown and grown. This August sees the Women’s Rugby World Cupstaged in France, a competition for which we actually boast an international England squad with a chance of winning something.

Thirty years ago I had to battle to establish a girls’ football team. Rugby was an impossible dream, despite my growing up in Moseley, Birmingham, home of a by no means insignificant club. Today the game is on the national curriculum, meaning boys and girls alike receive six weeks’ compulsory tuition. Beyond this, 15,000 women and girls play rugger every week. Yet evidence of this remains curiously culturally invisible, as television companies appear reluctant to record the exploits of athletes who, if male, would be household names.

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In the old days female England players arrived late from university. Today they come early from school. The full-back Emily Scarratt, 24, aka Scazza, Femur (for her endless legs) and The Shard (she stands at 5ft 11in), picked up her first ball at five. And it shows. Already boasting 50 caps, this coruscating all-rounder excelled in basketball, tennis and rounders, but chose rugby as “the perfect sport. I can’t say I like being smashed, but the game combines so many different elements.” Her day job is teaching rugby to teenage boys.

Katy Mclean, fly-half and captain (Anna Huix)

Ahead of the Ireland match, the girls (they are always “the girls”, never “the ladies”) have been “in camp”, meaning a week away from work. (Unlike their male equivalents, they do not have professional status.) This crack unit is backed by 12 experts: three coaches, three physios, a doctor, a strength and conditioning expert, two performance analysts, a nutritionist and a sports psychologist. Team England moves as a pack, an army, today’s match against Ireland being, in the head coach Gary Street’s terms, “a real war”.

He opens a tense backs meeting, co-led by the 28-year-old captain Katy Mclean, a fly-half, currently sporting a black eye, and, like Alphonsi, an MBE. She and her team-mates discuss strategy, legs jiggling, faces taut. There is little make-up in evidence, but some sport St George’s-flag fingernails, and braids are clearly a thing. They speak in tactical shorthand: players will “shut down”, “chop” and “put on the floor”, executing “a Zulu”, or a “definite Tonga”. “Let’s make sure we give them a world of pain,” utters the otherwise serenely benevolent reception teacher Mclean.

Gary Street, head coach (Anna Huix)

We retire to the changing-room, where techno music deafens, to embark upon a flurry of grazing and hydrating, strapping up of body parts and attaching padding. There is some watching of the men’s game, occurring first in this double header, but the focus is largely inward.

I tell 46-year-old Street that, even as a bystander, I am jumpy with nerves. “Easy,” he deadpans, “we’re looking for a state of optimal arousal.” Universally known as Streety, he commands with a quiet intensity, suggestive of calculated calm. He trained as a chartered quantity surveyor and once coached the teen England Academy, remaining a father figure to many of the girls.

In 2001 he left his well-paid career to earn £10,000 a year as full-time coach to the England Women’s squad, forcing him into debt. In the bad old days – some six years’ worth – he worked from a rat-infested Portakabin. His salary is now manageable, but is hardly Croesean, especially when you consider that he will be away from his young family for 112 days this World Cup year. Four losses and he would be fired. He wears a heart monitor on the touchline.

There are differences between the male and the female games, though many find this in the women’s favour. Says Street: “The ball’s in hand a lot more. Men generally kick longer, making it a kicking game. Ours is more free-flowing, with more passing. It can feel old-fashioned, more complete, total, expansive, exciting. But the levels of skills are looking very comparative. We’re trying to play a good, more all-court game. It may be less aggressive, but that doesn’t make it any less physically assertive.”

A lineout early in this year's England v Ireland Six Nations match (Anna Huix)

I get a sense of this as I stand ahead of the girls in the tunnel before kick-off, high on Deep Heat, feeling the token weakling. As the England men come off the pitch, the women run on, the men warmly supportive. There are dazzling floodlights, but what gets you is the noise: the roar of almost 90,000 onlookers resonating in the pit of the stomach, Twickenham’s animal bellow.

The 86,000 crowd for the men’s game dwindles to 15,000-ish for their female peers: a dispiriting exodus. Still, there is a feeling that playing after the chaps, thus catching some of the same audience, has been a plus in making viewers see the games as on a par. The teams share the same Rugby Football Union (RFU) Twitter account, having become fully integrated 18 months ago, the result of 10 years’ campaigning.

Ireland are defending a shock 2013 triumph that ended England’s dominance after seven consecutive victories. This may be my first rugby experience, but adrenalin surges are soon the only feeling in my numb and puny body, as the game swings first one way, then the other.

After the requisite 80 minutes, the score is England 17, Ireland 10. The women have mirrored what the men achieved a couple of hours earlier. I high-five a couple of ecstatic little girls, all hair and limbs. Their idol is Maggie Alphonsi – along with Taylor Swift – and they fall into a deep swoon as she cheerily poses for selfies.

Flanker Maggie Alphonsi poses with fans for photographs after the match (Anna Huix)

Everyone is bleeding as Anna, our photographer, and I marshal the players for post-match portraits. There is relief but little jubilation. Mclean, especially, looks spent. The players change into truly hideous, Andrex- pink festive uniforms that make them resemble so many shapely calved air-hostesses (please, some brilliant British designer, rectify this atrocity). There is supper with the Irish team, including Alan Partridge-style speeches about “the ladies” from male dignitaries. (Even this can be considered a coup – until recently, these characters would have remained unmovable from the men’s dinner.)

Yet I am the only drinker in evidence. Celebrating after this year’s Six Nations encounter with Italy in Milan, Street caught his team playing drinking games with tea rather than beer.

En route back to the hotel, Streety’s introverted, avuncular front falls away as he forces newcomers to the team coach into an obligatory singing performance. Unforewarned, Anna and I quaveringly give this initiation rite our best shot. We do not do as well as Deborah Griffin, the first female RFU council member and former Richmond player, who performs a fabulously risqué number. Still, there is a sense that we have gained acceptance.

Back in their Travelodge-style digs, players don onesies and engage in match video analysis over cake. Come morning, Mclean will repeat this exercise, before driving home to Newcastle and her weekend marking. I decide that someone should carouse and take an inebriated run at a tackle shield. The girls charitably inform me that I boast “good leg drive”.

Team members Rachael Burford and Becky Essex sing on the team bus (Anna Huix)

Three months pass, in which some interesting sporting developments take place. Consternation gathers over the Sports Minister Helen Grant’s own goal in addressing the fact that 1.8 million more men play sport than women with the remark, “There are some wonderful sports which you can do… and I think those participating look absolutely radiant and very feminine, such as ballet, gymnastics, cheerleading and even roller-skating.”

England Women come second to the Six Nations champions, France, and begin turning their attention to August’s World Cup. In the meantime it is announced that women’s cricket will join women’s football and hockey in having paid players.

I rejoin the girls in Beverley, in Yorkshire, where they have gathered for preselection World Cup training. Conditions are the extreme opposite to February: sun broiling, SPF liberally applied, Streety puce-faced and white eyebrowed. Some players are fresh – if fresh is the word – from Sevens (a shortened version of the XVs game) and have the stitches and crusting scabs to prove it. If it is possible, the players look even fitter. As the 25-year-old prop Laura Keates (aka Fanta/ Ginger Melon Head) says, beaming, “There’s no fear of muscle.”

England hooker Emma Croker with her daughter, Lucy (Anna Huix)

Hooker Emma Croker, mother of Lucy, the two-and-a-half-year-old team mascot, seems particularly strapping. Croker is generally amazing. She planned Lucy’s birth to fall between World Cups. Following an emergency Caesarean, she was back playing after four months. “Motherhood has made me more focused,” she says. “I have less time, so I make sure I get more out of it.”

Her fellow hooker Victoria Fleetwood – 24, blonde, a make-up lover with 39 caps – tells me that her skinfolds (fat percentage tests) are not exactly where she wants them. Still, she welcomes the media’s new emphasis on being strong not skinny and has recently posed naked for Sport magazine to promote the game: an awesomely gymnastic image. She has just finished lifting weights well in excess of her 11st 5lb frame.

I feel forced to admit to Alphonsi – a future Clare Balding if ever there was one – that I have been surreptitiously checking out her backside. Our heroine grew up physically and socially disadvantaged: club-footed, from a challenging neighbourhood. In this she may have been atypical, but in her personality, she, Scazza, Mclean and co constitute a discernible type.

The England Women rugby player is a hand-shaker with impeccable manners, imbued with brains and brawn. She is a disciplined but in no way aggressive individual. Hyperactive, she finds it impossible to relax, using what scant free time she has for yet more sport. She boasts little vanity, but enjoys dressing up. She loves her fellow players. (Quoth Mclean: “You put your body on the line for them.” Literally? “Literally.”) When considering a course of action, she asks herself how she will feel at 60 about an opportunity missed, then seizes it.

The most obvious forthcoming opportunity would be the prospect of going professional. That’s not yet on the table, but at the time of this article going to press, discussions about funding players to play full-time are underway within the RFU, which is keen to provide the strongest possible English players for the Great Britain seven-a-side squad competing in the 2016 Olympics, as well as supporting the English 15-a-side team.

Sophie Hemming, 33, tight-head prop, 67 caps, and a vet from Bristol, is the only player I ask who would not leap at the prospect, as she relishes combining a stimulating career with consummate athleticism. But it is what Mclean, Scarratt, Alphonsi, Fleetwood, Croker and Keates have been waiting for, although Mclean cautions: “For us, this is already professional.”

“You think, 'This could be my job!’” thrills Croker, with the hand-clasped excitement that lesser females direct towards being a Disney princess.

Laura Keates, prop (Anna Huix)

As I write this piece, I look again at the portraits of the girls taken by our photographer Anna, and – although these are faces and bodies with which I am familiar – they strike me as something radical. It is not just that these complexions are unairbrushed.

It is not only that these physiques have such obvious strength, or the fact that their owners are literally rather than metaphorically dirty, bruised by endeavour rather than some male assailant’s fist. It is something about their gaze: the unshowy confidence in Laura Keates’s eyes; Sophie Hemming’s countenance, as compellingly self-possessed as a German Renaissance beauty.

These are not representations of women we see in magazines. Something powerful is happening here – to do with body image and body fact – and that rare thing: something truly beautiful for little girls to aspire to.